Unity game engine adds support for Windows Holographic, and Visual Studio Code in the latest update

Unity Technologies has released a new update for the Unity game engine, bumping the version to 5.5. The beautiful thing about Unity is that it works everywhere – BlackBerryOS 10, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows – including UWP, Apple TV, Android, Wii, Wii U, Xbox, PlayStation. It doesn’t matter where you are developing – you can use Unity to do it.

Today, Unity released version 5.5 of the engine, which adds support for Microsoft’s Windows Holographic platform. Since all Windows Holographic apps are also UWP apps, the support also extends to every platform that can run UWP apps – Xbox, Windows Mobile, Windows 10, and HoloLens.

The Unity Editor

The Unity Editor has also been updated – it now supports Holographic Emulation so that developers can test run their holographic creations within the editor.

The editor also lets developers prototype, debug, and iterate on the design without ever leaving it – you don’t need a HoloLens device to build and deploy the applications. This should save developers at least $3,000, as that’s the cost of the HoloLens development kit.

Unity 5.5

There’s a whole bunch of things that have been improved with this update – the particle system, for example. There’s a revamped lighting module for the particles, along with a brand new noise module that lets you apply turbulence to your particles, while also giving you the option to use efficient (and low quality) sound effects, or something a bit more resourceful.

The animation window in Unity Editor has also been revamped and now features improved performance and improvements to the workflow experience.

There’s also simpler things, like the brand new splash screen tools that let you create a splash screen before your game launches – the tools give you a variety of options to customize the splash screen.

Visual Studio Code

The latest update also adds support for Visual Studio Code editor on macOS and Windows; just select VS Code as your external script editor – Unity will open all scripts directly in VS Code, with debugging support, as long as you are using the VS Code Unity debugger extension.

You can read more about the Unity 5.5 update over at the official announcement, and also check out the full Windows Holographic documentation here.